Recently, with the advent of the Internet that uses TCP/IPs (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocols), numerous server computers and client computers are connected together as a single network. Through the Internet, users can create or generate, transmit and receive lots of information, by means of a personal computer in his/her home or office, or a portable computer.
Users can access to web sites operated by WWW (World Wide Web; web) server computers, using a web browser, such as, Netscape®, Navigator® or Microsoft® Internet Explorer, and can be provided various services, e.g., information search, community activities, transactions, etc. provided through the aforementioned web sites. In this case, data are typically transmitted from a server computer to a web browser of a client's computer, using HTTPs (Hypertext Transfer Protocols). The data transmitted to the web browser are referred to as web pages, and which typically is HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) documents.
HTML is a markup language that being widely used to create web pages, and has an advantage that ordinary users can easily understand it and make use of it. Furthermore, using an HTML document editor commercially available, an HTML document having complicated and many contents can be easily generated and edited. As such, easy creation and edition of HTML documents by ordinary users without specialized knowledge in programming is believed to be the most important reason for current success of the web. However, one of disadvantages of HTML is that HTML is the presentation language for formats and layout, not the language for describing data. Therefore, it is possible to easily create and format documents by using HTML, but there is a limitation when reusing the HTML documents as those in different type, and it is very difficult for searching useful information within the contents of the HTML documents. In addition, since HTML uses predetermined elements (for example, <HTML>, <BODY>, <TABLE>, etc.), document types that can be presented are also limited.
As a solution for overcoming such limitation of HTML, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has been proposed. XML was adopted as a standard for data exchange by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in 1999, and has been noted as next-generation Internet language because it has various advantages in regard of extensibility, compatibility, structurization of information, etc.
Most of current web pages are however still based actually on HTML, not on XML, although a considerable time has elapsed since XML appeared. It results from many reasons, but, among other things, it is because XML is too complicated for ordinary users to easily learn and use it freely.
Several XML editors have conventionally been proposed to allow ordinary users to use them, such as the editor for converting existing documents into XML documents and the editor for generating XML documents. For example, the conventional word processors for editing and generating an HTML document, an MS Word document, an HWP document, etc., may have an additional function for converting the documents in a format of HTML, MS Word, HWP, etc., into corresponding XML documents. An example of known editors for editing XML documents is disclosed in US Pat. 2003/0237048 by Microsoft Corporation (published on Dec. 25, 2003), in the title of ‘Word Processor For Freestyle Editing of Well-Formed XML Documents’. Also, FIG. 1 schematically shows conventional processes 10 of creating XML documents. As shown in FIG. 1, for example, an XML editor 11 that uses components executable on a web browser such as XML Spy®, commercially available from Altova, located in Vienna, Austria. Also has been known. And, an XML editor 12 executed as an independent executable program such as InfoPath® commercially available from Microsoft Corporation has been known.
According to such conventional editors for creating the XML documents, an XML document 19 is finally created with the data input by a user. However, using such conventional editors, the data input by the user cannot be used to create an XML document without conversion. The data input by the user through the editor 11 or 12 are converted via a dedicated format (e.g., “.XSN”) 13 or via Schema_(“.XSD”) 15, or stored in a database (DB) 17. The data can then be used to create a desired XML document 19 in the end a separate conversion program, that is XSLT(eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) 18.
Thus, the conventional editors for creating XML documents require programming or hard coding as an intermediate stage or conversion of the data input by a user to create the XML documents. Programming or hard coding for the respective intermediate process results in much development time and cost. In addition, by matching one XML document to one XSL document, a final XML document is created through programming, hard coding, conversion, etc. Accordingly, with the prior art editors, programming and hard coding is required, respectively, for each document in order to create documents in various formats for off-line use, so that it is very hard and difficult work for an ordinary user who does not have knowledge in programming to create an XML document.
Therefore, there has been a need for an editor for creating XML documents in various formats as in off-line use forms in a manner to minimize additional development cost or maintenance cost, and with which a user without knowledge of programming language, etc., could easily generate XML documents.